It’s most likely that you know the Annie’s Homegrown brand for their boxed macaroni and cheese. In fact, we’ve even tried some of that here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. However, as a frozen food review site, we’re much more interested in Annie’s frozen options — yes, Annie’s does have a line of frozen food.
We’ve dabbled a bit with their ice cream sandwiches and frozen macaroni, but today we’re checking out the Annie’s Uncured Pepperoni Mini Pizza Bagels, which can be found in the freezer aisle rather than where you’d find boxed mac and cheese. And that’s a good thing, because these would melt otherwise!
Anyway, let’s get on with it!
There are a few different cooking methods listed on the box — you can cook these in the microwave, toaster oven, or traditional oven. Because it really doesn’t take that much time (and because we didn’t want to deal with soggy bagel bottoms), we decided to use the traditional oven. This does have a crisping tray in the box, but since we used the oven, we weren’t able to try it out. You definitely don’t want to put the crisping tray in the oven or toaster oven! (If you want to read the full cooking instructions for all three methods, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Our bagels ended up just a little too crispy. We accept full responsibility for that, because we could have pulled these out earlier or used the microwave cooking instructions, so that’s on us. However, even setting the crispiness aside, these bagels aren’t very good. The bagel portion has an odd flavor, like someone mixed a little bit of cinnamon into it. These don’t taste like the classic bagels we know and love.
And the toppings don’t really do these any favors. These are topped with a tomato paste, flakes of mozzarella cheese, and chunks of pepperoni. There’s not enough cheese for it to really do any of the things that a cheese is supposed to do — these don’t taste cheesy, and there’s no stretchiness.
The sauce has a little bit of flavor, but that flavor is kind of muted. We could tell what it was supposed to taste like, but we really only found ourselves with a ghost of a flavor rather than an actual flavor. And despite the fact that the pepperoni portion seems kind of generous, we didn’t taste it at all. We’re not sure what went wrong here, but no part of these pizza bagels tastes like it should.
There should be nine bagels in a box, and four bagels is considered a serving size — so that’s slightly less than half a box. If you eat four bagels, you’re looking at 210 calories and 490 mg of sodium. If you end up eating the full box in a sitting, you’re up to 450 calories and 1,110 mg of sodium.
The Annie’s Homegrown Uncured Pepperoni Mini Pizza Bagels are surprisingly bland and mediocre. Pizza on a bagel seems like a no-brainer to us; we’re not sure how Annie’s managed to mess these up. Every major component here needs to be looked at and adjusted in order for these to taste the way they should. As is, these are frustratingly low in the flavor department.
Now, to be clear, these aren’t bad. We didn’t find them to be disgusting, and our reviewer ate all nine bagels. The problem is that the flavors are either slightly off or mostly absent, leaving these tasting bland rather than exciting. And the pizza bagel concept seems pretty darn exciting to us.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen pizza bagels, check out our package scans below.
